Tag: book nerd

I got through one chapter of The Wednesday Wars– and I wanted to quit.

My passion is middle grades fiction. I adore it. And this book had a Newberry Honor Medal right on the cover. But I was bored. I didn’t take to Holling Hoodhood, the protagonist, right away. He kept prattling on about Treasure Island, which I’d never read & didn’t give a flying fig about. Plus, he seemed kind of whiny.

But I kept reading…

The Wednesday Wars turned out to be one of the most moving, gut-punch real feelings books I’ve read in a while. I will cop to being enamored that much of the book works its way around and through Shakespeare’s plays (the Shakespearian curses–and the big themes, too). It’s set in 1967-68, so the book also reckons with the Vietnam war and the tense political climate (A+.for being historical without feeling preachy or teachy).

I loved all those things… but most loved that Gary D. Schmidt creates a seventh grade protagonist who likes Shakespeare AND baseball, who says stupid things AND cares deeply that he said them, who is learning AND feeling AND making the reader laugh. (And maybe cry, too.) Schmidt’s artful turns of plot and his ability to narrate with stark honesty and beauty made this book a stand-out.

We need more protagonists like Holling: boys who are sensitive, kind, brave, and real. And seventh graders need more adults who take them seriously, who listen, and who remember how hard seventh grade can be.

I haven’t read something that shook me to the core like this since I read The Handmaid’s Tale in college. I wish every person over 18 in the United States had to read this novel. Because it’s scary as fuck. And I wish I didn’t believe Octavia Butler had prophesied our future as a country–but it seems more and more plausible by the day.

I picked up the book simply because I was embarrassed to say I hadn’t ready any of Butler’s books. I picked Parable of the Sower for no other reason than the cover made it clear the protagonist would be a young black woman–she kinda looked like she was going to kick some ass.

By the end of the first page, I forgot I was reading a book. No time necessary to settle into the story or to adjust to the narrator/protagonist. There was just the story. And, Good GOD, what a story.

It’s a futuristic, dystopian novel. Don’t expect to be spared blood, gore, or pain. If you are too fragile–or jaded–to be horrified, look somewhere else. But, if you want what feels like an objective view of our future if we don’t halt civil rights infringements, the ever-evolving militarization of our police forces, rampant racism, and escalating climate change–read on.

Do not read this right before bed. And find someone who will listen as you sort your feelings about this novel. Because you’ll have feelings. Big ones. Necessary ones, I believe.

I’d never had much use for tea, until I encountered Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party in Atlanta.

I was raised on coffee. I drank coffee-milk as a preschooler (it’s a delightful concoction of milk, sugar, and a little coffee. It’s warm, sweet perfection). So, I never really gave tea much thought. I mean, sure, it was fine… for other people. But I couldn’t take it seriously.

But, like so many things, that’s shifted for me since I moved to Atlanta. Primarily because of this whimsical, amazing, quirky little place Candler Park:

When you walk inside the shop, everything feels like gloriously cluttered and warm. Chalkboards with list after list of various types of tea line one wall. They’ve snugged together several small tables in the front room that feel intimate and lively. Paper ornaments and lights dangle from the ceiling. And the tea is nestled behind the counter.

It feels close. Connected. Alive with thoughts and ideas and conversation.

In the next room are two long tables nestled right next to tall, full bookshelves that remind me both how much I love to read and how much knowledge, how many stories, I’ve left unexplored. The lights stay low, which makes it feel like a rather intellectual, bookish type place. And folks are always typing way on their computers. I’m sure some of them are just doing plan old work. But in my mind, all of them are researching, and writing, and forming networks of thoughts and experiences that will shape the world. Or that will at least shape them. And, amid all this amazingness, are dozens of paper umbrellas–in various states of repair and coherence–dangling upside down from the ceiling.

I was instantly in love. From the second I walked in the door. In love and compelled, because I wanted the full experience of being in such an eclectic teahouse, to drink tea. And, because if I’m going to drink tea I want to be the valedictorian of tea, immediately I decided I wanted to attend a High Tea at Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party.

But something as special as a high tea needed to wait for just the right occasion.

And then I forgot all about it. For months.

Until I picked up There Goes Sunday School, by Alexander C. Eberhart, where the protagonist (bless his heart) finds himself in Atlanta at Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party in one of the most charming scenes I’ve read in a while.

And right then, I knew: when my sister brought her family to Atlanta to visit, we’d go to Dr. Bombay’s for High Tea. And so we did:

I adore the fact that I picked up a random novel in a bookstore and not only did I find parts of my own story represented that random LGBTQ YA novel but I ALSO remembered something important to me, an experience that I wanted to give to people I love that I’d forgotten all about. But then I remembered. And being there, felt like doubly a gift–because I am blessed with people I love who I want to share experiences with AND because I’d been given a story that reminded me of those very things.

I had so many feels about this book, it’s hard to even get them into words. I love LGBTQ Young Adult novels. For real. They’re a gut-punch reminder of what it’s like to be young, falling in love, and figuring out your sexuality… while trying to navigate the impeding (and inevitable) doom of folks finding out you’re gay. Add into the mix that There Goes Sunday School is set in Atlanta… Totally swoon-worthy.

What I didn’t expect was for this YA novel to unearth so many feelings for me. I mean, I didn’t just relate to the protagonist… at one point I WAS the protagonist. Anti-gay upbringing? Check. Conservative Evangelical church? Check. Being told I was for sure gonna burn in hell? Check. But, perhaps especially when it’s rooted in pain, it turns out that representation is just as important at 43 as it is at 13. Watching my own story play out (with some significant plot deviations, of course) was cathartic.

Eberhart wrote believable characters with realistic responses to their surroundings and upbringings. He managed to create a tender novel that didn’t read as over-dramatized or simplistic. And he got in some wins for his characters that, for me at least, are incredibly important to see in print.

Being gay isn’t a tragedy. In fact, coming out and living into your truth is a victory. Even when it’s hard. Being who you are is worth risking everything for. And that’s a truth that everyone needs to hear more of.

I didn’t immediately get swept away in Grant Park’s narrative. The cover promised a lot: a thriller that critically examines race in America. The thriller part never quite delivered for me. But the nuanced look at race in America, that rang a lot truer. I’m glad I hung in for it.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote columns for the Miami Herald for years. And it shows. He’s able to write characters that grapple with racial issues (internally & externally)–as well as expose the less noble parts of folks exasperated by the national conversation about race (or lack thereof). He lets you inside the heads of a successful black journalist and a kind-of-successful, white newspaper editor–both of whom are fed up with the racial tableau in America. But, because this is a good piece of writing, nothing about the two men is quite as straight forward as it seems.

As a white reader, I never felt preached at. But I also didn’t feel pandered to. Pitts showed dogged determination in giving his readers an honest look at what it’s like to be black in America. Pitts creates a narrative that demonstrates that no group exists as a monolith–not black folks, not white folks–and that we can still be redeemed. But redemption means wrestling with our own selves first, conquering our own demons. And then listening to each other. One by one. Redemption isn’t wholesale. According to Pitts, the fight might be won one soul at a time.

The story both sucked me in and repelled me. I wanted to know more, to solve the puzzle, to KNOW what happened. Simultaneously, I just wanted to get it out of my head.

It’s grizzly y’all. The scene that plays over and over again is horrific. It gave me nightmares. And I couldn’t shake it, couldn’t stop it from running on a loop in the back of my mind.

But what’s really compelling about the book is that there are no heroes. Everyone (save perhaps one character) is multi-faceted, complex, and far from perfect. The points of view vary, which adds a texture that builds suspense and draws out the mystery. And it relies on the one principle that shoots abject fear through my heart: everything can rest on one decision. One decision can end life as you know it.

But can it really?

Or is there something bigger at play, beneath the surface, in our subconscious, in events that other people set in motion?

I’m not sure this book will answer that question. But it sure as hell will make you ponder it. And isn’t that what horror is supposed to do: make us wrangle with the light & darkness within ourselves and question what really separates the good from evil?

The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars is a mash-up of sorts. He loosely chronicles his wife’s end of life journey & his own grief, which he views thought the lens of neuropsychology, philosophy, myth, and atheism.

I took an Intro to Philosophy Course in college. I remember the distinct feeling of my brain aching, because it had no solid idea on which to take hold. Everything—ideas, the world, my very self—felt illusory. It was unsettling.

What does that have to do with The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey Through Consciousness by Paul Broks? Everything. This book is a mash-up of sorts. He loosely chronicles his wife’s end of life journey & his own grief, which he views thought the lens of neuropsychology, philosophy, myth, and atheism.

“But those are multiple lenses!” you’re probably protesting. Why, yes. Yes they are. And that’s precisely why I could make it through the book without being launched into an existential crisis (although it took me 10x longer than usual).

Broks works hard to make complicated concepts accessible. He tells stories, draws parallels, and guides the reader through an examination of human consciousness—in part using quantum physics of all things. Here’s my favorite bit:

“There’s a tantalizing pleasure to be had the unfathomability of quantum physics. But what if we ourselves are unfathomable?…[what if] human beings are, to the human mind, fundamentally, intrinsically, incomprehensible. We might get glimpses of what we fundamentally are . . but only glimpses.”

How beautifully…cosmic. The whole book felt like a grand wandering through time & space and the opportunity to get a rare glimpse at the mystery of what makes us who we are.